Performance Management Tools & Techniques

Performance Management is a vital process for modern organizations. In an enterprise setting, comprising of hundreds, or thousands of employees, one cannot wait for the annual review results to assess if employees are performing well, or, alternatively, afford to wait for customer feedback to discover that they’re not. Managers need effective performance management tools and techniques set in place to receive on-time and pertinent feedback. More importantly, employees expect feedback and a culture that fosters their development, and want to know how what they’re doing ties into corporate objectives, what they are expected to do and how they are measured for it.

We’ll begin by discussing the 5 key practices for performance management and will then discuss tools that will help you maintain them.

5 Key Performance Management Tools and Techniques:

Be straightforward about your expectations: Employees need well-defined goals, not vague requests or retroactive feedback. They need to understand what is required of them, what their personal benchmarks are and what guidelines are there to achieving them. Employees can’t be marginalized or left in the dark running around in a proverbial hamster wheel. They need to feel part of and see the bigger picture of how they fit in with — and contribute to — corporate objectives. Define specific goals, define paths and explain rationale and context.

Be direct about how you measure performance: After setting goals employees must know what constitutes success. The guidelines for measuring success must be clear and objective. Measuring success is a large part of the Performance Management process and must not be a rare or annual review practice. Both managers and employees must always have at their disposal a clear and easy to read analysis of where they are relative to their goals, peers and personal benchmarks and be able to course correct or get guidance if necessary.

Make sure you focus on work essence: If you decided on certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ask yourself – are these KPIs measuring the actions that lead to good performance or are they just retroactively measuring success? While the first will let you motivate employees, improve performance and fix problems the latter will just cause underperforming employees to disengage and won’t teach you much.Another question to ask is – Will employees improve performance as result of working towards these KPIs or might they just work on the specifics of what’s being measured? For example, if in a sales center your performance KPI is how many calls are completed daily, an employee might be motivated to call a lot of people and hang up. On the other hand if you measure performance according to average conversion rates from lead to client combined with average call attempts made per lead, you could actually find out if poor sales performance is caused by lack of persistence or by something else.

Invest in building motivation: Happy, motivated workers perform better. There are many different options for motivating employees. Anything from pep talks to showing appreciation for a job well done can do the trick. The more employees are involved with their performance management process they more they are likely to be motivated to improve. A good option for building motivation is gamification i.e. using processes and experiences from game mechanics and design such as leaderboards, status bars and badges to generate intrinsic motivation. To learn more about how gamification can be used to motivate employees and drive performance click here and watch our free webinar.

Monitor & adjust: Performance management should offer constant and direct insights and feedback that allows managers to, for example, improve employee engagement, or provide precise, on-demand, bite-sized training in areas where skills are lacking. If any of the measures you take are not relevant or not working you should be willing and quickly able to adapt.

Technology to the Rescue

The technology developed to support and improve performance management in organizations is constantly improving. Nowadays performance management technology can facilitate all of the above practices — from streamlining goal-setting via digital processes where objectives are synced with data analytics on actual business performance and are altered as needed in real-time, to tethering efficiency measurements to the employee/manager discourse, through to using gamification platforms to instantly display targets and performance and build narratives that engage employees during their day to day grind. The aim of all these tools is to improve performance by empowering, substantiating and focusing the discourse between employees and managers and giving both sides the tools to improve.

How Gameffective Helps

Utilizing performance management platforms such as Gameffective generates transparency through collecting data from the company’s various enterprise systems and presenting it to employees and managers in the form of easy to understand, easy to relate to game elements e.g. missions and points. Additionally Gameffective connects performance to learning prompting employees to complete relevant training campaigns or micro-lessons based on weaknesses seen in their work or their ability to hit certain KPIs.

Gameffective provides a performance management platform, with gamification features built in, designed to significantly improve business outcomes through real-time performance tracking, goal-setting, employee engagement and on-the-job achievements.

The platform provides: an open architecture for easy integration with existing systems, working across numerous enterprise applications simultaneously, and on mobile, TV, and the web. It enables: quick launching of gamification projects, real-time performance metrics that go beyond just using leaderboards and points in performance gamification, sophisticated analytics for visualizing performance over time and across any benchmark and engaging themes and narratives to help drive motivation and learning.